Scientists Create Tiny Holograms with New Metasurface Technology

Scientists have officially created tiny holograms. How exactly? They've used a "metasurface" capable of the ultra-efficient control of light, representing a potential new technology for advanced sensors, high-resolution displays and information processing.

The metasurface itself is made of thousands of V-shaped nanoantennas forming into an ultrathin gold foil. This, in particular, could make possible "planar" photonics" devices and optical switches small enough to be integrated into computer chips for information processing, sensing and telecommunications. It works when laser light shines through the nanoantennas and creates the hologram 10 microns above the metasurface.

In fact, the researchers were able to create a hologram of the word PURDUE. This particular hologram was smaller than 100 microns wide, which is roughly the width of a human hair.

"If we can shape characters, we can shape different types of light beams for sensing or recording or, for example, pixels for 3D displays. Another potential application is the transmission and processing of data inside chips for information technology," said Alexander Kildishev, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The smallest features--three strokes of the letters--displayed in our experiment are only one micron wide. This is a quite remarkable spatial resolution."

For practical applications, metasurfaces could make it possible to use single photons for switching and routing in future computers. While using photons would dramatically speed up computers and telecommunications, conventional photonic devices can't be miniaturized. Why? The wavelength of light is simply too large to fit into the tiny components that are needed to integrated circuits.

Yet nanostructured metamaterials are making these applications more likely. They make it possible to reduce the wavelength of light, which means that new types of nanophotonic devices could be created. This could open up a whole new generation of devices in the future.

"The most important thing is that we can do this with a very thin layer, only 30 nanometers, and this is unprecedented," said Vladimir Shalaev, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This means you can start to embed it in electronics, to marry it with electronics."

The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.